


all creatures great and small

by klickitats



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Did I mention mabari?, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Haven, Mabari
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-13
Updated: 2015-03-13
Packaged: 2018-03-17 15:46:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3535043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/klickitats/pseuds/klickitats
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first thing Cullen teaches his mabari is how to find the Herald.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all creatures great and small

**Author's Note:**

> The Herald gives Cullen a mabari pup, and things flop about and crash from there.

He’s in the middle of correcting a recruit’s stance—“ _Maker_ , recruit, are you drunk or practicing your dancing?”—when she materializes out of Void-knows-where beside him. Cullen coughs, angling back and resting his hands on the pommel of his sword.

“Herald,” he inclines his head. Under Haven’s bright, bright sky he can see every smear of dirt and rugged hem on what passes for a mage’s vestments when traveling. Breeches and that long leather coat aren’t armor, never will be, and he opens his mouth to say so before noticing what’s in her arms.

Something small, bound up in scraps of leather and wool. She carries it tenderly, tucked into the crook of her arms. “I,” her voice falters. “You were the first person I thought of.”

She extends her arms and he reaches instinctively to take the bundle. It’s warm.

“A refugee boy found him in the stables. No mum,” she said, scratching the back of her head. “I don’t know if it’ll live. But I thought…”

Somewhere in her soft explanation Cullen’s hands have realized what they hold, and he pulls back the blanket. There’s no mistaking that faint brown fuzz, the coal black nose, the tiny ears—

“A mabari,” he breathes. All the world is still, just for a moment. He remembers: the barking of dogs while he played in the village green, the shrieking laugh of his little brother in the sun, the smell of mud and sun and days of rain that felt like decades to a child stuck inside.

“Yes,” says the Herald. “I…I’m sorry, she needs care and I know how busy you are…” She lets her hands fall to her sides. Her voice is strange and quiet. “Commander?”

Her voice is like a quiet bell ringing through the Fade. “Thank you,” he says. The mabari pup is so small, but warm and breathing, breathing still. “Thank you.”

His hazel eyes meet hers and he smiles, a broad and handsome thing. She blinks, steps back. “Of course,” she murmurs. “You’re sure…it won’t be too much? I don’t want to add to your burdens.”

“Never,” Cullen answers, face all sunshine.

The Herald hides her smile behind her hand. When did joy become such a strange find on this side of the veil? He cradles the pup in one big arm and starts back up to the chantry, pausing to give a corporal some direction before his boots pad up the hill through the snow.

The Herald is left among the twirling and singing of swords in the sunlight, watching him go until he disappears behind a stone corner.

~~~

Maker, but the pup is _small._ Cullen doesn’t know much of dogs, but he knows when one’s been weaned too early. It’s nearly midnight, the winds of the Frostbacks howling outside the chantry in restless fits.

He’s on a stool in front of the fireplace, the warmest place he can find. He leans over the tiny brown mabari, holding it in one hand, trying to make it lap milk. It can barely lift its head. All creatures are the Maker’s creatures, so Cullen is not ashamed to will a prayer towards Andraste. _All things deserve life. Under your wings, all deserve warmth. Under your heart, all deserve light. Remember even the smallest of your children._ The pup makes a weak noise, and his heart drops. “Come now,” he murmurs, “come, my brave girl. Come on.”

He knows better than this—pups and kittens and all sorts of small creatures die every day. It is part of life. _Not just pups and kittens_ , he reminds himself with stern will. Men and women and children. All of the Maker’s creatures. He should know better.

“Try a finger,” a dark, deep voice from above. Cullen looks up and sees Bull’s man, Krem, standing over him. His head is cocked and the grin on his face is remembering every detail of finding the Lion of the Inquisition perched by the fire with a pup. “Have her suckle from your finger.”

Krem kneels down next to Cullen, demonstrates. The pup tries, but is almost too weak to hold its head up. “You do it,” he encourages. Cullen dips his finger in the milk, warm from the fire. He offers it to the pup, waits, nudges.

The streak of relief that carves itself into his heart at the feel of the pup’s tongue, lapping milk off his finger feels so much like victory. Cullen does it again, and again, and again.

“Got the hang of it now,” says Krem, that grin still patched on his face.

~~~

Cullen wants to name the pup _Cordelia_ —it was a queen in one of Mia’s favorite books to read aloud to him as a child, and the name makes him think of cool green lakes and peace. But it’s too long, and too silly, and too much—so, Cor.

Cor runs all in a fumble before she has the sense to walk, or even crawl. She follows Cullen everywhere, refusing to be parted from his side and running headlong into his boots when he has to stop suddenly to take a scout’s report or correct a recruit’s shield practice. Every once in a while, he’ll scoop her up into his arm when she lags behind, or they’ve just climbed all the way to the chantry in the snow. The banks of white are just a little too tall for the pup.

The Herald comes back from the Fallow Mire, a bleak wetness behind her eyes and covered in swamp muck. But she stops before she does anything else to visit him and the recruits, watching them train with blunted longswords. The two of them lean against a half wall of stone, Cor sitting and panting between them. Her little tail whips back and forth in the cold air.

Cullen watches the reflections of light from the longswords slide back and forth in the Herald’s eyes. “The ones who rescued—they got back in one piece,” he says when he remembers himself. Her eyes are silver, like steel in the sun.

“Good,” she replies, and sighs—a breath of relief that casts weight from her shoulders. “I’m glad.” She looks down at Cor, who gazes up with big brown eyes and a slobbery tongue.

“Are you sure she’s going to grow up to be a ferocious beast?” she asks, an eyebrow raised.

“As fierce and bitter as Southern snow,” says Cullen, mimicking her eyebrow, and the Herald breaks into laughter.

“Maker, Commander,” she manages, kneeling down to scratch Cor behind the ears. The pup promptly falls over, rolling on her back with stubby feet in the air. Cullen snorts.

“Spoiled little thing.” The Herald’s voice is fond. “Take care of my commander while I’m gone, will you?”

The back of Cullen’s neck flushes red and hot. He mouths at least two sentences before his voice catches up: “But you just returned. You should rest, eat—“

“Hinterlands tomorrow,” she answers, standing and brushing her hands on her trousers. Cullen wants to take her by the wrists and root her to the spot, and then admonishes himself for such a thought. “Problems with the refugees,” she supplies. “Some kind of supply shortage. Everything’s so torn up down there between the mages and the templars that getting anywhere or anything takes breaking a neck or two to get it done.”

She seemed younger three months ago, thinks Cullen, when he met her over the war table. With her big wide eyes and messy strands of dark hair in her face. Arms crossed and pensive.

His thoughts pause as she reaches across to touch the crook of his elbow, the only part not hidden by steel. She squeezes. “Don’t worry overmuch,” she says, “Silver looks good on armor, not hair.”

She trudges off, swamp muck and all, leaving Cullen sputtering with Cor.

~~~

Cullen dreams the next night that Cassandra and Blackwall and Solas come back from the Hinterlands with a staff and a beaten leather jacket, but no body, no bones, no blood. They say she disappeared into the wind and was blown across the hills of the Hinterlands like dust or the givings of dandelions in summer.  

He takes men and steel and all his failure into the hills, ravages them for dirt and remains and finds nothing. He goes to war with kingdoms, breaks castles and kings at the knee, blood in the rivers, vengeance growing fat on the cries from the land.

He finds himself at the top of a mountain with an empty chair, and still, nothing, nothing, nothing, not even a drop of her blood for the trouble, nothing.

~~~

The first thing he teaches his mabari is how to find the Herald.

“Could I,” he begins, and then falters. Josephine and Leliana are on their way out of the war room, arguing about a particular noble coming in from Kirkwall in the morning and the Herald is staring at the troop movements on the Storm Coast, not listening.

“Herald?” he tries again. She starts out of her reverie.

“Yes, Commander?”

“I…” He tries again, and his hand rests on the back of his head. Cor, a now-permanent fixture of the war room, whips her tail back and forth and pants, looking up at him.

“I’m teaching Cor how to find,” he says, “and, I, well—”

“How to find what?” asks the Herald, amused. “Elfroot? Bones? Treasure?”

“No, people. They’re good for tracking, can find anything,” Cullen manages. “So…”

The Herald looks at him. “You want…what, my sock or something?”

“Yes,” says Cullen. “Very much.”

The grin on the Herald’s face is exactly the same as the one that lay there the morning she questioned him about his templar vows. Cullen wonders just when the world began to find him so damned amusing. She draws a scarf from her pocket. It was blue once, but now the threadbare gray is grimy and dirty from Maker-knows-what. She places it in Cullen’s hand.

“Now close your eyes and count to fifty,” she says. Cullen blinks.

“If you’re busy, Herald,” he begins, and she stops him with a shake of her head, begins backing out of the room slowly.

“Fifty…forty-nine…forty-eight…” She disappears through the heavy war room door. “…Forty-seven…” He can hear her quiet voice as it rounds the corner.

Cullen waits, dutifully, and then the games begin.

Josephine’s office. Down the stairs into the old storage underneath the Chantry. Cor knocks over a barrel with the Herald squeezed and snug inside by the mess hall. Inside Cassandra’s tent. Lying in a patch of elfroot a hundred paces behind Adan’s hut.

Finally, deeper into the woods, behind an old shack, watching the sun go down behind the crests of the mountains. The Herald sits on a rock, legs bundled under her, and her dark hair swaying against her ears as the cold breeze slides by.

“Good Cor,” says Cullen, scratching her behind the ears. “You found the Herald. Good girl.”

Cor breaks away to sniff at the Herald, nudging impatiently with her big brown head. The Herald smiles, rubs her back. “I’m easy quarry,” she says. “I like being found.”  
  
~~~

Out of all the hundreds of shoes in Haven—heavy boots, leather boots, metal boots, dirty boots, smelly boots—Cor likes Leliana’s shoes best of all.

Cullen returns a blue shoe made of soft leather, the bow affixed to the toe ragged and worse for wear, with enough repetitions of “forgive me” to fill the war room to the rafters. Cor hides under the table. Leliana takes the shoe, fingers the bow. “No harm done,” she says. Her eyes are somewhere else. Cor’s whimper makes Cullen wince.

“I’ll make sure she doesn’t do it again,” he promises. Leliana laughs softly.

“Not the first to find my shoe,” she replies, stowing the shoe in her pocket. “And not the last, either.”

~~~

 _Where am I?_ is his first bleary thought, his skin covered in crawling cold sweat. He pushes himself up on one arm. At the foot of his bed, Cor’s ears flick up. She wiggles her way down the rough wool coverlet.

Cullen runs his hands through his matted hair. His hands shake and shake. Cor, big and brown and not yet full grown but taking up his whole lap now, situates herself between his legs.

He makes his hands stroke her fur, back and forth, back and forth, until the tremors quell. Until he can exhale.

He remembers the slip of lyrium down his throat, the strange blue heat lighting up his veins. He was so much warmer, once. But the cold has its own kind of wicked burn.

A few nights later, Cor sleeps on his legs. And she keeps sleeping there, night after night, a solid anchor of warmth towing him to the bed. Nothing near a cure, but it helps.

~~~

The first time Cullen watched Bull and Cor wrestle it made him nervous, and he hadn’t realized how transparent his worry was till Krem punched him in the arm.

“She’s fine,” he says, grinning. Cullen grumbles something as Cor rolls away, snow flying, gnawing at one of Bull’s big horns.

~~~

The Herald comes back from the Hinterlands, arguing with Solas as they clamor up to the chantry. Cor bounds where Cullen can’t, knocking a healer over in her mad dash towards the pair of mages. She stops at the Herald’s knees, panting and grinning. She leans down to scratch her ears, Solas continuing on as though nothing’s happened.

The light is different, thinks Cullen, when she comes back. The bright snow of the Frostbacks makes all of Haven gleam under the sun. But when the Herald returns, it feels as though everything has settled into place. The shadows slide away. The sun not only burns, it glows. Things are right, are better than right, when all are home and safe and sound.

“Fair travels, then?” is what Cullen manages when he catches up to Cor and the Herald. She nods.

“Come,” she says, “we’ve much to discuss, and it will not keep.”

~~~

They fight that night, bitter and sharp. Cullen’s leg is cramping something damnable, and the pain makes his words razor-tipped, much to his shame.

“I’ve made a decision,” says the Herald for what must be the tenth time, her fingers rubbing her temples. It’s just them in the War Room, Leliana and Josephine having already retreated to their battle stations. “Mages. It’s final. I understand how they work and their strength will be better bound with mine to close the breach.”

“Give them a chance,” Cullen fires back. “They will manage just as well as a pack of rebel mages, I assure you.”

“You were not there, Commander. Would you ally with a madman such as the Lord Seeker? Surely, _surely_ that seems unwise.”

Cullen froths, and she snaps, “Why are you so angry? You’re no longer a templar. You’re the Inquisition, as much as I am. We make the best decision we can.”

“But this is so much more,” he retorts. “You’ve—you’ve chosen a side. You’ve chosen a winner. Templars—” He rubs a hand over his face, tries again. “Good men and women, serving the Maker the best they know how.  If the Inquisition grows it is mages who will find safe refuge in our judgment, mages who history will forgive.”

“Templars are welcome here with open arms, if they so choose, Commander!”

“And it doesn’t matter now,” Cullen says, the pain giving way to numbness, “as that life is no longer mine. Very well.”

The Herald shifts back and forth. “I would have your support, Commander.”

“With all I have to give, Herald. Excuse me.” The words are toneless, and even he isn’t dull enough to see the crack of pain in her eyes. But he is gone, disappearing down the hall to his study.

He does not sleep that night, instead writing letters to old Circle strongholds, pleading with templar factions to break bread with the Inquisition. He knows well they will not come, and he knows well that if they did, their souls may be lost to the vengeance that gashes the Hinterlands in bloody streaks.

He wishes it did not feel so much like his own soul was being given up, the work of his hands left to rot and to ruin.

~~~

The Herald leaves for Redcliffe in the morning. She does not bid goodbye to the Commander, and he does not seek her at the gate.

~~~

Days pass and the nights grow colder. Cullen spends a night on his knees before Andraste, wondering if kneeling before the Bride with the company of a dog is something the Chantry would disapprove of. He finds he does not care, and Cor snores loudly as he murmurs _I shall embrace the light. I shall weather the storm._

The prayers smooth his regrets quiet, and he remembers the green lake, the smell of dewy silence.

_I shall endure._

The kneeling is murder on his knees, plain and simple. Cullen will spend the next day firmly ensconced in his office chair. He sends Cor to wait at the gate, to sprint and find him when she returns. Days pass, nights pass, and the wind howls.

_What you have created, no one can tear asunder._

~~~

Cor yips and yaps and crashes into his office. His scout continues giving his report above the din; this is second nature by now. Cullen silences her with a pointed look, pressing his relief down somewhere deep so it doesn’t show on his face.

He goes hunting for the Herald as soon as he can, but finds her nowhere. Cassandra cautions him to wait a day or two. She does not call the council, but talks to Leliana and Josephine alone. Cullen meets a Tevinter mage with a wild spirit and tamed mustache come to join the Inquisition who finally, _finally_ tells him a little of what happened while in Redcliffe.

So he waits. And waits. And on the third night, when the fires burn low across Haven, he gives Cor the Herald’s scarf and murmurs, “Find.”

It takes a little while. But he finds her on the dock, overlooking the frozen lake, wrapped in a blanket. She sits, her long legs dangling over the side. She is not a small woman, the Herald. Cullen’s height exactly. Cor nearly dumps her into the ice.

Cullen sits beside her, Cor squeezed warmly between them, brown head on her paws. He sits, waits. It takes a long while to find his voice.

“I am sorry,” he says. “It was not worthy of you—what I said before you left.”

The Herald blinks, her gray eyes cast over the frozen lake. “I—I had forgotten,” she answers, and he blinks.

“Of—of course,” he stutters. “Forgive me.”

The Herald shakes her head, runs a hand over her face. She looks lost. “Dorian said he told you,” she begins, “about what happened. About where we were…sent.”

They sit in the quiet of the night. “He told me you saw Leliana,” Cullen tries for the root of her melancholy. She nods. “Anyone else?”

“Cassandra,” she murmurs. “Bull.” She looks at her hands. Cullen wishes he remembered how to do this—how to comfort someone. He opens his mouth to try and her words still his voice.

“I didn’t—I didn’t see you,” she says. “But I read—“ She swallows. She tries again.

“Herald—“

“Trevelyan, at least,” her voice grates across the air. “Just for a moment. Please.”

Cullen nods. “Trevelyan,” he says. “Trevelyan.”

“I read a note,” she begins, her eyes tracing the stars. “Forces marshaled three times to defeat Corypheus. Three times, whatever was left of the Inquisition and Ferelden mounted sword and shield and whatever they could to bring him down. Three times.”

“Andraste wept for their sacrifice,” Cullen says, meaning it as comfort. “They did what they had to do. Even if their end was not victory.”

“It was you,” says Trevelyan, and the whole world halts.

She swallows again and pushes on, like she has to get the words out before they burn her insides. “I knew it was. Your name wasn’t written, but I could _feel it_ in the note, I knew you wouldn’t stop, I knew it as certainly as I knew my name. You wouldn’t give up, you wouldn’t cease, no matter if victory was impossible. You would carry on, fight, endure, whatever it took. You would not stop until—until—“

She cannot finish the sentence. She runs a hand over her face again, and says in a soft, certain voice:

“You. There is no other. I knew it was you.”

Cor breathes out a heavy sigh, and the snuffling pushes the silence away gently. Cullen feels as though someone pulled the entire dock out from under him.

“I would,” he says finally. “If there was the slightest chance you yet lived, if there was a chance to beat Corypheus back another day. I would.”

She slides a hand between them to touch his heavy gauntlet, gleaming a dim silver under the moonlight. He cannot feel her hand as it squeezes the metal.

“It broke my heart.” Her voice is so quiet. “And it made me find a way back. Made me strong.” Her tongue worries at her lip. “To know in that moment and before, and in the future—you were coming.”

Cullen’s fingers find her wrist. He can feel the faint shudder of her pulse through his glove. His thumb strokes back and forth across the skin.

“Yes.” His voice is soft and strong. The moon witnesses the vow, as well as the mabari. Somehow it’s best that way. “Till my breath leaves my body and my legs lose the way. And even then,” his voice murmurs somewhere below a whisper, “I will.”

~~~

How splendidly it all goes to shit, and so quickly.

Even he had been thinking about taking Varric up on a cup of wine by one of Haven’s roaring, celebratory fires when the night lights up in hellfire. His templar brethren, marching over the mountain. An archdemon. Corypheus. _Corypheus._

Cor is the one who drags him back, her teeth soft but firm in his leg. The Herald disappears through the chantry doors and then the way is shut. It is Cor who butts him back towards the people, Cor who snaps and snarls at him every time he stops to look over his shoulder, Cor who throws her whole weight into the back of his legs as he climbs through the snow, and pauses to cast a glance back, back, back.

They find a snowy plain to camp, far from Haven. Too far. Too far for one mage to walk, no matter how much fire she can summon to her hands or how long her legs are. He cannot sit still. He paces, burning.

Hours— _hours_ —later, when the injured have been settled and the people clump together in frightened huddles, Cullen takes Cassandra and Leliana and removes a scrap of gray from his pocket. He hauls Cor up the snowy hill, kneels down by her shoulders.

“Find,” he murmurs, “find, Cor. Find.”

And it takes time. They wander through the cold in silence, Cor bounding forward and trekking back. There’s so little to go on. She wanders in circles twice, and Cullen stills his tongue against anger.

_All things deserve life._

The gusts cut through his body in cold, bold strokes. His hands shake and his heavy boots churn through the snow. She would have made it this far, he thinks. If he can make it far back enough, they will meet, two wayward points meeting in the shadow of the mountain.

_Under your wings, all deserve warmth. Under your heart, all deserve light._

When the wind grows wild and sharp, Cassandra yells over the din: “Time!”

He knows. Maker, Maker, he knows.

He can barely see Cor in front of him; the wind kicks up flurries of snow and makes his eyes water. He grasps the pommel of his sword and pushes through. It takes so little, just to try. This woman, who saved them, saved them with just her two hands and all she needs is someone to try, to not give in, to come back. It seems so small, to endure the howling wind and the razor cold. He would climb a mountain. He would strap his dog to his back and climb the Frostbacks, climb them with no shoes and no gloves, climb them unarmored and full of maleficar, climb mountains made of lyirum blue and lyrium red, if it came to it. Until his legs froze into the ground, until he lost his fingers to the craggy rock, until the wind took his eyes and his breath.

It seems so little, just to _try._

_Remember even the smallest of your children._

Cor yelps. Even he sees it through the snow—a figure, long-limbed and bent double against the wind—trudging through with slow, aching steps. Cor makes it there first, and the figure collapses against the dog, her arms around the scruffy neck, her face buried in the fur. “Thank you,” says Cullen, unsure if he’s speaking his prayers aloud by now or not. All his whispers are lost in the wind anyway.

Cullen makes it there, and by the Maker’s will he hoists Trevelyan up into his arms, wrapping her as best he can in a cloak. His fingers fumble for her wrist and that faint pulse that beats a steady pulse he knows by heart— _you came, you came, you came, you came._

As if his legs knew any other vow. Cor does not leave his side as they trudge down the mountain, head held high against the cruel wind of the Frostbacks. As if his arms knew any other command.

_Look upon them, Maker, all your creatures—great and small._

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr: klickitats


End file.
